841–850 of 851 posts
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Speaking as a parent, the idea of having “a couple hours of free time per day for a month” to learn difficult new material is laughable, and it has nothing to do with intellectual ability.
I don't know. Even after working at a FAANG, having a toddler, having a robust social life, I spend at least 10 hours a week learning new stuff.
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Hah! Reminds me of https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768 . Cynical answer though — Google does not want people like you. They don't want to hire entrepreneurs or inventors. They want people who can churn out code when given specific instructions, and that is what their interview process optimizes for.
> They want people who can churn out code when given specific instructions, and that is what their interview process optimizes for. I think the reason is a bit different. Google is a search engine. It's a company whose success was due to one (or several) but very good algorithm. That explains everything: why they are so obsessed with algorithms, why they hire so much olympics winners, why they don't care about anythi…
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How many interviews involve asking the prospective hire if they know how to gather and define requirements?
This is implicit in a coding interview, though. I, the interviewer, take a couple of sentences to describe a problem. What next? Way too often, rather than ask more questions - gather and define requirements - a candidate will launch straight into solving a problem different from the one I am describing.
Then, we talk and I look for all the qualities they /do/ have.
Sadly, lots of interviewers get a kick out of finding out what the interviewee does not know, so they can feel superior.
Coding challenges should be: -1. take-home -2. concise -3. relevant to the job -4. take no more than 4 hours
One example of such a decent test that I came across involved having to read a file, parsing it and turning its contents into some basic HTML. During the interview we talked about things like "what if the file were really big", e.g. let the candidate reflect on the limitations of their implementation. This was enough to suss out where somebody is, professionally. And nobody had to have a bad day.
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>> They want people who can churn out code when given specific instructions, and that is what their interview process optimizes for. Somehow I doubt that. Can anyone who actually works at google comment on what it's like? Do people come to you with specific requirement and expect you to crank out code like the interview problems? I've never worked somewhere where the software folks were actually just coding machines.
Not at all. I've been at Google for a bit over two years, and my experience has been at the far other end of the spectrum: a lot of autonomy, gathering requirements, designing & implementing. Also I have a fair amount of agency to see something that would make people's lives better and pitch it as a thing I'd like to work on. If it's less than a day or two of work I can generally just go do it.
You’re clearly not working on their military-contract Terminator-drone program…
…Unless “better” means “stone cold dead”.
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When interviewing for places like Google and Amazon, your political connections and things like publications/degrees still matter a lot. Good performance on the interviews can be impactful but it's not the only factor. The incredibly biased committees review a lot more than that at google.
Maybe a better way to put it is, the whiteboard problem itself is a pass or fail question and therefore that aspect of the interview by itself is unbiased.
Trust me, it happens for certain applicants.
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Maybe a better way to put it is, the whiteboard problem itself is a pass or fail question and therefore that aspect of the interview by itself is unbiased.
So I guess you’ve never seen someone being fed an answer during an interview. Trust me, it happens for certain applicants.
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> You're absolutely insane if you compare google engineers with the trump administration. Nobody thinks of google engineers like this. whoosh . Re-read what I said to understand how I didn’t compare anyone to Trump. You never ask someone who is responsible for creating a whole process/team/product for honestly critical info about it. Unless they are willfully malicious (which I doubt Gayle is), they are certainly con…
https://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-work-at-Google-What... Do you have any reasonable way to convince me and everyone reading your responses that your opinions are more valid than other people who offer contrary opinions? Why would someone take a 50% pay cut and turn down a google offer? There has to be a bigger reason than the one you mentioned. >whoosh. Re-read what I said to understand how I didn’t compare an…
Their strategy is the same across the board: practice makes perfect (a.k.a leetcode). Don't give up, keep trying.
You are well aware that there's a big industry around interview preps for Hi-Tech BigCos and Gayle herself is one of the implicit founding of this industry right?
Pre-Leetcode/HackerRank the kind of people who got accepted to Google are mostly their kind: ACM/TopCoder and most folks who grew up/go to school in Bay Area because well duh... It's what they do everyday: practicing leetcode style problem solving. The Stanford/UC Berkeley folks got in because well... Interview questions are shared among interns because there's no database like today's LeetCode.
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You don't have to be mean. Claiming that algorithmic interviews is a proxy for IQ is also probably something that the powers that be at Google "pulled out of their ass". I don't see any data that says it's correlated with standard IQ test scores. I'm skeptical that it is a good proxy since you can specifically study for these interviews. The IQ tests, at least in theory, should be attempted without preparation so as…
Not trying to be mean but the fact he made that up out of thin air is not only something that isn't backed with data but something that is intuitively not true. With the reputation and amount of comp google offers there is no reason why intelligent people or less intelligent people would just avoid google. You're assuming only less intelligent people want higher salaries while intelligent people don't which isn't tru…
It matters how long you spent time on leetcode/other practices from popular algorithm books (comen, skiena, sedgewick). Source : friends, ex co-workers, and personal experience. Sometimes they just change the "story" questions but the algo and tricks are the same, sometime they took it verbatim from leetcode (or the other way around: someone leaked them to leetcode).
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So I guess you’ve never seen someone being fed an answer during an interview. Trust me, it happens for certain applicants.
You've seen this at Google or faang?
Here at Amazon, if the candidate knows the hiring manager and interviewers they can be fed all the answers. Not being able to code fizzbuzz doesn't block people from getting 350K+ offers. It's insane. Amazon tried to fix this problem with "bar raisers" but it doesn't work since humans naturally follow the crowd, even if the crowd is corrupt.